Ghost Story (50 page)

I remembered the solid warmth of my dog, Mouse, his heavy head pillowed on my leg while I read a book, and the softness of Mister's fur as he came by and gently batted my book away with his paw until I paused to give him his due share of attention. I remembered my apprentice, Molly, diligently studying and reading, remembered us having hours and hours of conversation as I taught her the basics of magic, of how to use it responsibly and wisely—or, at least, as responsibly and wisely as I knew how. They weren't necessarily the same thing.

I remembered the feeling of pulling warm covers up over me as I went to bed. Of listening to thunderstorms, complete with flickering lightning, pounding rain, and howling wind, and of the simple, secure pleasure of knowing that I was safe and warm while the elements raged outside. I remembered walking with confidence in pitch darkness, because I knew every step that would take me safely through my rooms.

Home.

I invoked the memory of home.

I don't know at what point the bullet dissolved into raw potential, but its power blended with my memories, humming a powerful harmonic chord with the emotions behind those memories—emotions common to all of us, a need for a place that is our own. Security. Safety. Comfort.

Home.

“Home,” I breathed aloud. I found the tatters of Mort's gathering spell, and in my thoughts began to knit the edges of the memories together with the frayed magic. “Home,” I breathed again, gathering my will, fusing it with memory, and sending it out into the nighttime air. “Come home,” I said, and my voice carried into the night, reverberating through the mist, borne by the energy of my spell into a night-shivering, encompassing music as I released that power and memory into the night. “Come home. Come home.”

It all flowed out of me in a steady, deliberate rush, leaving me with unhurried purpose. I felt the magic rush out in a steadily growing circle. And then it was gone, except for the faintest whisper of an echo.

I opened my eyes slowly.

There had been no sound, no stirring of energies, no warning of any kind.

I stood in a circle of silent, staring, hollow-eyed spirits.

Now that I knew what they were—the insane, dangerous ghosts of Chicago, the ones that killed people—they looked different. Those two little kids? My goodness, spooky now, a little too much darkness in their sunken eyes, expressions that wouldn't change if they were watching a car go by or pushing a toddler's head under the surface of the water. A businessman, apparently from the late-nineteenth century, I recognized as the shade of Herman Webster Mudgett, an American trailblazer in the field of entrepreneurial serial murder. I spotted another shade from a century earlier who could only have been Captain William Wells, a cold and palpable fury radiating from him still.

There were more—many more. Chicago has an intense history of violence, tragedy, and sheer weirdness that really can't be topped this side of the Atlantic. I couldn't put names to a third of them, but I knew now, looking at them, exactly what they were—lives that had ended in misery, in fury, in pain, or in madness. They were pure energy of destruction given human form, smoldering like coals that could still sear flesh long after they ceased to give off light.

They were a loaded gun.

Standing behind them, patient and calm, like sheepdogs around their flock, were the guardian spirits of Mort's house. I had assumed them to be his spiritual soldiers, but I could see now what their main purpose had been. They, the ghosts of duty and obligation unfulfilled, had remained behind in an attempt to see their tasks to completion. They, the shades of faith, of love, of duty, had been a balancing energy with the dark power of the violent spirits. They had grounded the savagery and madness with their sheer, steady, simple existence—and the faded shade of Sir Stuart stood tall and calm among them.

I held Sir Stuart's weapon in my right hand and half wished I could go back in time and rap my twenty-four-hours-younger self on the head with it. The fading spirit hadn't been trying to hand me a weapon at all. He'd been giving me something far more dangerous than that.

I thought he'd handed me potent but limited power, a single deadly shot. I'd been thinking in mortal terms, from a mortal perspective.

Stuart hadn't given me a gun. He'd given me a
symbol
.

He'd given me
authority
.

I held the gun in my right hand and closed my eyes for a moment, focusing on it, concentrating on not merely holding it, but taking it into me, making it my own. I opened my eyes, looked at the tall, brawny shade, and said, “Thank you, Sir Stuart.”

As I spoke, the gun shifted and changed, elongating abruptly. The wood of its grip and stock swelled out, becoming knife-planed oak and, as it did, I reached into my memory. Runes and sigils carved themselves in a tight spiral down the length of the staff. I took a deep breath and once more felt the solid power of my wizard's staff, six feet of oak as big around as my own circled thumb and finger, the foremost symbol of
my
power, gripped steadily in my hand.

I bowed my head, focusing intently, drawing on the memories of the hundreds of spells and dozens of conflicts of my life, and as I did the symbols on the staff pulsed with opalescent energy that reminded me of Sir Stuart's bullets in flight. Power hummed through the spectral wood so that it shook in my hand and flickered sharply, sending pulses of weirdly colored light, light I sensed would be visible even to mortal eyes, surging through the mist. There was a rushing sound, something almost like a sudden strike upon an unimaginably large and deep drum, an impact that rippled out from me and passed throughout the city and the surrounding lands. It sent a shiver of energy through me, and for an instant I felt the warmth of the southern wind, the close, muggy dampness of the air, the wet, slushy cold of the snow beneath my insubstantial feet. I smelled the stench of Morty's burned home on the air, and for a single instant, for the first time since the tunnel, I felt the rumble of hunger in my belly.

Then dozens of spectral gazes simultaneously shifted, focusing exclusively on me, and their weight hit me like a sudden cold wind.

“Good evening, everyone,” I said quietly, turning to address the circle of raw fury and devotion that surrounded me. “Our friend Mortimer is in trouble. And we don't have much time. . . .”

T
he Corpsetaker's stronghold hadn't changed.

But it
had
awakened.

I felt the difference as soon as I approached, and a quick effort to invoke the memory of my Sight brought the changes into sharp, clear view. A column of lurid light, all shades of purple and scarlet, rose into the night sky over the entrance to the stronghold. I could see the magical energy involved, my gaze piercing the ground as if it had been slightly cloudy water. There, beneath the ground, where I had seen them on the stairs and in the tunnels, were formulas of deadly power, full of terrible energy, now awakened and burning bright.

All of that shoddy, nonsensical, quasimagical script hadn't been anything of the sort. Or, rather, it had been only apparent nonsense. The true formulas, strongly burning wards built on almost the same theory and system I had once used to protect my own home, had been concealed within the overt insanity.

“Right in front of me and I missed it,” I breathed.

I should have known better. The Corpsetaker had once been part of the White Council, sometime back before the French and Indian War. We'd gone to the same school, even if we'd graduated in very different years. Not only that, but she was getting assistance from a being that had been created from part of my own personal arcane assistant. Evil Bob had probably given her similar advice on constructing wards.

Wards weren't like a lot of other magic. They were based on a threshold, the envelope of energy around a home. Granted, the loonies currently inhabiting the tunnels were hair-on-fire bonkers, but they were still human, and they still had the same need for a home that everyone else did. Thresholds don't care about sunrise, not when a living, breathing mortal fuels them every moment, just by living within them. Build a spell onto a threshold and it doesn't easily diminish. As a result, you can slowly, over time, pump more and more and more energy into spells based upon it.

The Corpsetaker hadn't needed access to a wizard-level talented body to create the wards. She'd just used tiny talents regularly over months and months, and built up the wards to major-league defenses a little at a time, preparing for the night when she would need them.

Obviously, she'd decided that since she was torturing a world-class ectomancer in order to make her big comeback from beyond the grave, tonight was a great night not to be interrupted.

“I hate fighting competent people,” I growled. “I just
hate
it.”

“Formidable defenses,” said a quiet voice behind me.

I looked over my right shoulder. Sir Stuart studied the wards as well. He'd become a tiny bit more solid-looking, and there was distant, distracted interest in his eyes.

“Yeah,” I said. “Got any ideas?”

“Mortal magic,” he replied. “Beyond our reach.”

“I know that,” I replied grumpily. “But we've got to get in.” I looked around at the crew of lunatic ghosts I'd mentally dubbed the Lecter Specters. “What about those guys? Breaking the rules is kind of what they do. Are they crazy enough to get in?”

“Threshold. Inviolable.”

Which again made sense. I'd gotten into the fortress the night before because the door had been open and the ghost-summoning spell had essentially been a big old welcome mat, a standing invitation. Clearly, tonight was different. “Well,” I muttered, “nothing worth doing is easy, is it?”

There was no response.

I turned to find that Sir Stuart's shade had faded out again and his eyes were lost in the middle distance.

“Stu? Hey, Stu.”

He didn't respond except to face forward again, his expression patient, ready to follow orders.

“Dammit,” I sighed. “Okay, Harry. You're the big-time wizard. Figure it out by yourself.”

I vanished and reappeared at the doorway. Then I leaned on my staff and studied the active wards. That did me limited good. I knew them. I'd used constructions much like them on my own home. You'd need to throw several tons of bodies at them, literally, to bring them down—which was what had happened to my first-generation wards. Wave after wave of zombies had eventually gotten through.

I mean, go figure. You prepare your home for an assault and you don't take zombies into consideration. I'd fallen victim to one of the other classic blunders, along with not getting involved in a land war in Asia and never going in against a Sicilian when death was on the line.

My second generation of wards had planned for zombies. So had these. So even if I had zombies, which I didn't, I wasn't going to be able to go through them.

“So,” I said. “Don't go through them. Go around them.”

“There's an open Way between the heart of the fortress and the Nevernever,” I said. “That's like a permanently open door with an all-day invitation, or they wouldn't need fortifications on the other side. All you have to do is get to it, assault Evil Bob's defenses and Evil Bob and whatever the Corpsetaker recruited from God only knows what kind of dark hellhole, smash them up, and blast through from the spirit world.”

Well. That plan did have a lot of words like
assault
and
smash
and
blast
in it, which I had to admit was way more my style. One problem, though: I couldn't open a Way to the Nevernever. Once I was through, I could probably find Evil Bob's fortress—it would perforce have to be nearby. But, like the mortal-world lair, I couldn't open the door.

“Other than that, though, it's genius,” I assured myself.

Gandalf never had this kind of problem.

I sighed. Sometimes my inner monologue annoys even me.

“Edro, edro,”
I muttered. “Open.” I rubbed at the bridge of my nose and ventured,
“Mellon
.
”

Nothing happened. The wards stayed. I guessed the Corpsetaker had never read Tolkien. Tasteless bitch.

“I hate this depending-on-others crap,” I muttered. Then I vanished and reappeared at the head of my horde. “Okay, everybody,” I said. “Huddle up.”

I got a lot of blank looks. Which was probably only reasonable. Most of those spirits predated football.

“Okay,” I said. “Everyone get to where you can see and hear me clearly. Gather in.”

The ghosts understood that. They huddled—in three dimensions. Some crowded around me in a circle on the ground. The rest took to the air and arranged themselves overhead.

“Christ,” I muttered. “It's like Thunderdome.” I held out my hand, palm up, and closed my eyes for a moment. I called up my most recent memories of Molly, both of her physical appearance and of her evident state of mind. Then I focused on projecting those memories, following my newly developing instincts with the whole ghost routine. When I opened my eyes, a small, three-dimensional image of Molly hovered above the surface of my palm, rotating slowly.